PROFILE MUHAMMAD ALI: Muhammad Ali, who will visit his ancestral home in Co Clare next month, is as famous today as in his boxing prime. George Kimballlooks at the triumphs – physical and moral – of a peerless champion
MORE THAN TWO dozen men have claimed the heavyweight championship in the three decades since Muhammad Ali last owned that title, and they could, almost without exception, walk unrecognised down the main street of any major city. But, as the late publicist, Irving Rudd, once noted, “if Ali went into a hut in Africa, a village in Asia, the outback in Australia, or a marketplace in South America, the people would look at him, smile, and say ‘Muhammad Ali!’ ” We’re just guessing here, but you could probably add to that list a boreen in Co Clare.
My children have often noted, more out of amusement than actual annoyance, that they grew up in a house in which there were more photographs of Muhammad Ali on the walls than there were of themselves. Of course, some of these included both Ali and the kids: there is one, for instance, of Ali, a beatific smile on his face, holding my now 25-year-old daughter beside the swimming pool at Caesars Palace. I can date that one to the week of the 1986 Barry McGuigan-Steve Cruz fight, because Barney Eastwood’s face is in the background.
Last Friday in the Bronx, Ali was honoured prior to that evening’s New York Yankees-Boston Red Sox game. Not only did the predictable chants of “Ali! Ali!” resound during a standing ovation 50,000 strong, but millionaire ball-players from both teams halted their pre-game preparations, dropped their gloves and bats, and raced over to meet, and perhaps touch, a man who had stopped boxing before most of them were even born.
He was arguably the best heavyweight who ever lived, but the boxing accomplishments of the three-time world champion don’t begin to explain the almost universal reverence in which the mythic figure is held in his dotage. Great boxers such as Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey and Sugar Ray Robinson retained a certain popularity after their careers ended, but you didn’t see any of them flying around the world to light Olympic torches or negotiate the release of hostages.
Dempsey operated a midtown saloon in his post-combat years. Robinson scuffled to make a buck as a song-and-dance man, while Louis became first a cartoonish wrestler and then a “greeter” at Caesars Palace. The financial motivation of Ali, who can still cause a traffic jam just by stepping out of a limousine, is somewhat different. He is constantly on the road these days, raising funds for children’s hospices and for his non-profit Muhammad Ali Foundation.
PROXIMITY TOfamous athletes generally leads to a rather jaded view for those in this profession, if only because exposure to the human frailties of widely admired figures almost inevitably causes disappointment. From the time he first came to our attention as a sleek teenager at the 1960 Rome Olympics it was apparent that this was a boxer unlike any other who had come before, but admiration for Ali the fighter doesn't begin to explain why he remains such a beloved figure today.
Dr Wilbert McClure, the Boston psychologist who was his room-mate at the 1960 Olympics (and who, along with Ali and Sgt Eddie Crook, was one of three American boxers to win gold medals at those games), noted of Ali that “he always carried himself with his head high, and with grace and composure. We can’t say that about all of his detractors.”
His stature was enhanced, of course, by the brave stance with which he risked everything in his opposition to the Vietnam war. (“When Ali said ‘No, I will not go’,” noted journalist David Marash in a profile for Al Jazeera that never saw the light of day, “it turned a boxing champion into a moral champion.”) And that reverence in which he was held has continued to grow as he has matured gracefully into a universally beloved figure.
The irony is that a man once known for his quick wit and boastful jibes has been rendered as silent as a statue of Buddha.The Ali of today would probably have more to tell us than at any previous stage of his life, but between Parkinson’s Syndrome and the medication he must take to control it, he is able to speak only with great difficulty – and that’s on a good day. “He always spoke to the people,” says Howard Bingham, the renowned photographer who has been Ali’s best friend for more than 40 years. “Now they speak to him.”
Many who have watched the spectre of his trembling hands and his tortured attempts to speak leap to the conclusion that there has been a concomitant loss of cognitive function, sort of the way deaf people are sometimes assumed to be retarded by those who are themselves just too stupid to know better.
But Ali is not punchdrunk, or even close to it. His motor functions have been been diminished, but his mind has not.
“It’s like he’s trapped inside his body,” said his daughter, Laila. “He can think, he has things he wants to say, but his lips sometimes don’t move to get it out.”
THE ALI WHOreturned from a three-and-a-half-year exile to twice regain the heavyweight championship was a very different boxer from the one who had defeated the fearsome Sonny Liston to win his first, and the fact is that the world never saw him at his peak. Before they took his boxing licence away and stripped him of the title in 1967 he was not only faster than any heavyweight who had ever lived, but had continued to improve with every fight.
His second incarnation brought some of the more thrilling contests in the annals of the sport, but he could no longer rely on quickness and uncanny reflexes.
“I was better when I was young,” Ali acknowledged to his biographer, but “I was more experienced when I was older. I was stronger, I had more belief in myself. Except for Sonny Liston, the men I fought when I was young weren’t near the fighters that Joe Frazier and George Foreman were, but I had my speed when I was young.”
Particularly in the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” against Foreman and the 1975 “Thrilla in Manila” against Frazier, this second incarnation of Ali demonstrated something the first had never had to prove: that he could take a punch.
In the former fight he sacrificed his body in order to exhaust Foreman with a scheme he later described as “rope-a-dope” (“And,” recalled Foreman, “I was the dope!”), while the latter contest was a near-death experience that put both men in hospital.
In a private moment years later, when the Parkinson’s had begun to work its ravages, I asked Ali when he might have hung up the gloves if he had it to do all over again. He thought about it a bit before replying in what was barely a whisper: “George Foreman.”
Of course, if his career had ended on that high note in Zaire, the world would never have seen his third fights against Frazier and Ken Norton, but neither would it have had to endure its sad conclusion against Larry Holmes and Trevor Berbick in the 1980s.
Bill Nack, who chronicled many Ali fights for Sports Illustrated, recalled that when Ali's Parkinson's Syndrome first began to present itself, "he was mumbling and starting to slur, just a little bit. I remember thinking: 'Is he just tired?' Then I thought about all the times Joe Frazier had hit him and I realised he wasn't 'just tired'."
There are Parkinson’s sufferers who never took a single punch, but even Ali concedes that his present affliction is almost certainly the product of damage accumulated during those later fights.
A lion in winter, he may now be paying the price for all the joy he provided us back then, but pity would be misplaced. Ali remains, as his long-time physician, Dr Ferdie Pacheco, once put it, “in a complicated society, a simple, happy man”.
“He always thought that once he stopped boxing, people would forget him,” says his biographer, Tom Hauser. “He really didn’t understand how important he was.”
CV MUHAMMAD ALI
Who is he?Born Cassius Clay, changed his name to Muhammad Ali in 1964, but as a boxer was known as 'The Greatest'
Why is he in the news?He is visiting Dublin on August 31st, after which he will visit his ancestral home of Ennis. His great-grandfather, Abe Grady, left the town for the US in the 1860s, and Ali will become the first Honorary Freeman of Ennis Town
Famously said: "Last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalised a brick! Im so mean I make medicine sick!"